Category: pharmacy

The April Pharmacists Letter came out with some talk on the new Shingrix, shingles vaccine, which is said to be preferred by the CDC over Zostavax.

There’s another reason, besides markedly superior efficacy, to like the new vaccine offered by Glaxo SmithKline. Merck’s Zostavax is not so highly purified, and has the liability of having been developed with that MRC-5 strain of cells obtained from the pulmonary tissue of a 14 week, electively aborted, male human fetus.

If you prefer human organ and parts donations to be voluntary, then you have a few good reasons to choose Shingrix over Zostavax for preventing shingles. Shingrix is made using hamster ovary cells rather than a cell line from a killed human fetus. The GSK product is highly purified, has undergone extensive clinical trials, and is showing better efficacy and longevity of protection against shingles than Zostavax.

The source of the MRC-5 cell line is no secret. But you might want access to the drug information from Merck and Glaxo SmithKline to have certainty about how these vaccines are made. Click them, look for the section called DESCRIPTION and compare.

Remember the folks at cogforlife.org who keep a comprehensive repository of information about vaccines and other medical products which have ethically controversial origins, as well as available alternative products which can be used in their place.

Washington State has been persecuting Stormans, a family owned pharmacy business, whose employees oppose dispensing the morning after pill on the grounds that it can kill humans early in development. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected a hearing of their case, leaving them with the option of complying with Washington’s coercive, totalitarian stance towards those who try to practice health care, or run a business in accordance with their consciences, or losing their livelihood.

Since 2011, when the research was published showing that Plan B doesn’t work for average sized American women (due to their size), more states have been trying to coerce the dispensing of this bogus drug. This underscores government incompetence in the field of health care. When Plan B does work, it can operate by post fertilization mechanisms – killing the early embryo, and killing is killing, ‘no matter how small’. Research shows that it doesn’t work to delay or stop ovulation during the women’s most fertile day of the cycle, (after the luteal peak). Yes, if you’re small enough for Plan B (levonorgestrel) to work, it can be an embryo killer (abortive).

Silver lining: The supremes at least didn’t rule that pharmacists in all 50 states have to dispense Plan B, which could have happened with this nutty court. The Stormans could close down and bring up a business elsewhere, if they haven’t already been drained of the financial means to do so, by the onerous, and unjust state. Unfortunately the state of Illinois, as well as the federal government are currently attempting to legislate that pharmacists must practice incompetently with respect to the dispensing of birth control to patients.

Here’s a related commentary, as well as the research pinpointing why Plan B is such a huge fail in America.

Senate Bill 2960 has been introduced to the 114th Congress by Sen Cory Booker, (D) New Jersey, to force pharmacists to dispense all drugs and devices approved by the FDA to “prevent pregnancy”. Many of these drugs work by multiple mechanisms, and a section of the bill forbids informing patients of the possible abortive mechanisms, labeling this as deceptive. Another section of the bill invites patients to sue the pharmacist who does not give them birth control. Clinical reasons for refusing to dispense are supposedly allowed, but pharmacists will need to be prepared to pay lawyers, court costs, fines, and argue these reasons out in a courtroom. A desire to avoid dispensing drugs which can act by abortive mechanisms, is not considered a valid reason for refusing to dispense birth control.

Interestingly, Sen. Booker’s bill seems to allow that if a pharmacy does not stock any birth control in the normal course of business, it is not required to distribute the drugs. Conversely, if your pharmacy has some birth control pills, you would be expected to dispense these AND the fairly useless, morning after pills.

Lawsuits will abound if this bill passes, as its medical and regulatory basis is very poor, its constitutional basis is absent, and it leaves pharmacists liable to legal repercussions, even if they adhere to the letter of the law. Displaying medical and legal incompetence along with Cory Booker are Senators Baldwin, Blumenthal, Boxer, Brown, Feinstein, Franken, Gillibrand, Hirono, Kaine, Markey, Menendez, Merkley, Murray, Sanders, Shaheen, Warren, Whitehouse, and Wyden.

Pharmacists, check out S. 2960, and see if you think it’s time to leave retail pharmacy to the robots.

Louisiana Pharmacist’s Association nominated Lloyd DuPlantis for the Bowl of Hygeia award given out by the American Pharmacist’s Association for outstanding community service, and so he is appropriately recognized this 2015 year.

Lloyd DuPlantis

Yes, this longstanding pro-life pharmacist, author and philanthropist, does it all. In addition to his pharmacy practice, family life, writing, and a number of local and international charitable outreaches, he’s an ordained Catholic Deacon.

Pharmer sez: if you met Lloyd, you would never forget him, and is glad that her eldest offspring also had that opportunity before he headed off into healthcare.

Let the public be reminded that Planned Parenthood has been harassing pharmacists for 15 years or more, in an attempt to force the pro-lifers to dispense abortifacient drugs, with their efforts leading to success in a number of states. In fact, Planned Parenthood of Southwestern Ohio intervened directly in the employment lawsuitbetween this pharmacist and K Mart way back in 2001, in order to delay the inevitable outcome.

Planned Parenthood has been attacking pro-life health care professionals and Crisis Pregnancy Centersfor decades. Is there any reason that people should feel sympathy for the nation’s top abortion conglomerate, which kills babies and sells their body parts?

A pair of Austrian scientists, Belinda Pletzer and Hubert Kerschbaum have published a provocative article in Frontiers of Neuroscience, asking for more research on the effects of hormonal birth control on the brain. Of particular interest are the social and behavioral effects of these hormones when used in younger patients whose brains are still undergoing major development and maturation.

The authors review some studies of feminizing or masculinizing hormone effects upon mood, verbal skills, spatial reasoning, behavior and mate selection, which collectively could have profound effects on social structures in the long term. They suggest that any behavioral studies be controlled for the use of hormones by study subjects. Changes in brain structure caused by the various types of estrogens and progestins used as birth control, vary with the the degree of androgenicity or estrogenicity, and with duration of usage. Changes in brain development in younger BC users may be more profound, with some expected to be irreversible.

………and charging the government for the cost of the prescriptions NOT being filled. Owner of 184th Street Pharmacy, Ahmed Hamed, and pharmacists Mohamed Hasan Ahmed and Tarek Elsayed were arrested and charged with defrauding the New York Medicaid program, theft, and money laundering. They allegedly charged Medicaid 9.8 million dollars for prescriptions which were not being filled, and paying indigent AIDS patients a kickback for not taking their meds.

Walgreens has seen fit to fire a pharmacist who refuses to sell an ineffective drug.

It remains that Plan B can operate by post-fertilization mechanisms, in smaller than average American women, and so the ethical sensibilities of the pharmacist, Philip Hall, are also a valid reason to refuse to dispense the drug.

Walgreens has already had to settle lawsuits in Illinois for similar firings. Firing another pharmacist in Tennessee displays an ardent attachment to an agenda of denying the necessary clinical and ethical autonomy that is required for a pharmacist to practice in a competent manner.

A major source of Continuing Education, which Pharmer utilizes for keeping updated, and which serves both pharmacists and physicians, had downgraded the concept of linkage between abortion and breast cancer to the status of “rumor”. This was done in the face of a large body of peer reviewed research, and meta analyses which had produced conflicting results.

Under normal circumstances, a competent educator would conclude that there is a possible link, but that so far the analysis of data is conflicting or inconclusive. Further study is warranted. If an educator were not invested in the ideology that at least one abortion is a necessary female rite of passage into the Pentagonal Order of the Gaia Green Sisterhood, health professionals would be advised to be alert to the possibility of abortion breast cancer linkage and await further results.

Well, a new meta analysis from China is out now, showing a stronger link between abortion and breast cancer, as well as a sort of dose effect (the later the abortion, the bigger the linkage). Click on the image below, or click this link to see the reference.

Pharmer has not paid great attention to the theory of abortion breast cancer linkage, because so many abortion customers likely have such a high risk tolerance, that a 30 or 40 percent increase in the rate of breast cancer would be meaningless to them. It might be more useful to a woman who has been impregnated against her will, rather than as a result of willingly assuming personal risk. Public policy makers might have more interest in that linkage, as an impetus to control health care costs. The current crop generally likes population control and abortion so much that they are unlikely to be swayed.

This example is supplied mostly to inform people that their health care professionals are often being “educated” by ideologues rather than dispassionate purveyors of medical information. Consequently, the things that your health care professional tells you might be fairly inaccurate, or even opposite of the truth.

In conclusion, abortion (and late child bearing) probably do have a positive association with the increased breast cancer rate, but as always, further study is warranted. It’s not such a big deal that a person should need Xanax three times a day due to anxiety over breast cancer, but getting the mammograms and being a bit more vigilant would help if either of these life style options applied to you.

Your friendly Pharmer thinks that there are much bigger reasons to avoid abortion.

Mephedrone is one name for 4-Methylmethcathinone, which is related to the class of synthetic cathinone analogs known as bath salts. These were discussed elsewhere on the Pharm, in relation to serious behavioral disturbance.

Another such story has popped up in the news. This case illustrates the propensity of mephedroneto to lower the natural inhibitions with respect to self surgery, (in this case as chopadicktomy), and unauthorized surgery on others (stabbing).

A 19 year old student, From Haywards Heath, West Sussex, while high on mephedrone, stabbed his 46 year old mother, giving her life threatening injuries, then cut off his own penis. An individual close to the family told the Daily Mirror that the 19 year old “is normally a lovely lad, and very bright. But unfortunately, he had started dabbling in drugs”